Life is Shit : A Story About Beauty
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V
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She was wearing a white tank top and white tear away track pants with black stripes down the sides. Her toe nails were painted a strange hazel green, and when she pulled her hair out of her face I could see the color matched her eyes almost exactly.
She said she needed something special for her next tattoo.
“I can handle that. What did you have in mind?”
Mike was out on a beer run so I’d been sketching some new ideas of my own. I brushed them over to one side and she sat on the edge of the desk.
“You know I’m half-Asian right?”
I nodded. However, the thought had never crossed my mind, which was instead completely fixated on the way her raven black hair draped gingerly over her shoulders, the way she kept playing with it around her fingers, pulling it through her teeth.
“So, do you know the Chinese symbol for …” she bit her lower lip, “Seduction?”
I think I must have dropped my pencil.
Here was a perfectly fit dance major, cheerleader for the football team, sitting with one leg up on the edge of my desk. So… did I know the symbol? I didn’t want to say no, but Mike was the calligraphy guy. What could I do? My mouth was already moving. What the hell was I saying?
“Uh, well, Mike’s the expert on the actual… characters, but I might-”
“I’m not interested in Mike.”
She popped one button along the waist of her tear-aways, revealing a swath of almost invisible lace. Having been basically single my whole life and resigned to the idea of dying alone, this was something I had no idea how to handle.
“Let me get some reference drawings and see…” I had to breathe deep, “see what I can come up with.”
She smiled, and the “Mmm” that followed could have a simple, affirmative, “okay”, or an invitation to rip her clothes off and get down to business. I knew nothing about business, in so many words, so I tried to play it cool and collected. I pulled out some sheets Mike had done and quickly scanned for anything remotely related to ‘seduction’.
I looked up and she must have read my mind, since her next gesture was to trace a line across her chest to wear her name was embroidered on the standard issue cheerleader workout tank top.
“Holly, that’s lovely.”
She shifted on the desk and another button popped. She smiled.
“So the first thing I always ask is, where do you want it?”
She stood up and popped a third button on her waist and her fingers slid along her hip bone, just below the lace. She traced a circle just to the left of her pelvic bone.
“I want it down here.”
“Uh, also, it helps to know… uh, how big… are you comfortable-”
“Oh my god, you’re so bad.” She brushed her finger down the bridge of my nose.
“What?”
She then sat on the bed and crossed one leg over the other. Suddenly I had no idea what we were talking about, so I brought a couple sheets over. It was my only defense.
“Well, here’s sexuality,”
“Mmmm…”
“Uh… and here’s sensuality. I think we’re on the right track.”
“I think so, too.”
She hadn’t even looked at the drawings. She pushed me down on the mattress and slid halfway down my body. The door was open a crack and, honest to god, she pushed it shut with her foot and flicked the dead bolt with those hazel-green toes.
With her hands on either side of my waist I was trapped. I might call it something else now, but that’s what went through my head. I was worried that we’d ended up on Mike’s bed, not mine. Would he care? If the situation was reversed, would I? I couldn’t get out of my own head.
As she slid back up her eyes traced a line up my chest until our faces almost met. She paused, then moved forward until her cheek brushed against mine and began to whisper something in my ear. I don’t remember now what she said, because the next moment she bolted upright to her knees, shaking her head at the wall, saying, “This is all wrong.”
“Oh, no, its fine. Mike won’t-.”
“No, this is completely wrong.”
“We could move to mine if-”
“Not you. Not this.” She ripped a drawing off the wall and shoved it in my face. “This!”
She began pointing symbol by symbol, “This isn’t ‘dragon’, it’s ‘pride’. And this one here, the one labeled ‘strength’ is really ‘butterfly’. Did you make these?”
“No. What? No. These are Mike’s.”
“Well they’re completely wrong.”
“Shit.”
When she tried to unstraddle me and stand three or four more buttons popped loose and her pants fell to the floor but she was so dumbstruck at the artwork she didn’t even notice. She stood with her back to me, like I no longer existed, poring over sheet after sheet, shaking her head, but I couldn’t help tracing the near-invisible lace along her waist until it angled down and disappeared completely.
Then we heard the sound of clanking bottles followed by a somewhat muffled, angry version of Mike’s voice. He’d run into the door.
“Why the fuck is the door locked?”
Holly was so out of her wits that she flicked the lock open without a thought to her wardrobe situation.
Mike’s face flushed and his eyes bounced between Holly’s lacey underwear and my face. I shrugged.
“Nice.”
Finally aware of herself, Holly slipped her pants up and began fastening them like nothing had happened, which I suppose was the truth anyway.
“Either of you… want a beer?”
I buried my face in my hands, “Shut up, Mike.”
“Oh, so you’re Mike? This Mike?”
She shook one of the sheets in his face.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Where did you learn Chinese? Because some of these characters are completely wrong. Fuck, some of them aren’t even Chinese.”
“Uh…”
Mike opened a beer, plopped onto the bed and took a long drink. It was his only defense.
“Some fuckin’ artists you turned out to be.”
She’d snapped the last button and, sadly, that was the last I ever saw of Holly’s lacey underwear.
She eventually agreed to help us make the whole situation right, so Mike and I spent the next few days pawning whatever we could to repay the tattoo shops who’d bought any of our flash that had a mistake. There were a total of three sheets out of twenty we’d done that were error free, and I was at least glad that two of them were mine.
But now I was back to square one, and worse for wear. Investing so much time in this tattoo venture meant I was nearly failing most of my classes. Now that I was at the top of every tattoo shop’s shit-list, getting an apprenticeship would be next to impossible. Worse, if I wanted to not fail completely I’d have to start hammering out a half dozen final projects and come up with an exhibition of my own. In less than a week.
And Mike was basically in the same boat as me. We stripped our walls bare to remove any reminder of our massive communication failure. The day we’d reclaimed the last of our flawed artwork we sat in the dark and killed a fifth of cheap vodka. Holly stopped by for a shot, which felt somewhat cathartic. It’d been a long day for us all.
And the only thing I kept hearing in my head was the voice of my Graphic Design teacher, blowing smoke rings into the projector’s light and whispering, “Life is shit, and then you die.”
And I said to myself, “I can work with that.”
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© Anthony David Jacques MMX
